This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
This week:
- A very gay movie.
- An even gayer movie!
- A very gay video.
- An even gayer video!
- The gayest of them all. (Happy Pride Month!)
Actually, Top Gun: Maverick Is the Gayest Thing This Week
Last weekend, I made a gay pilgrimage of my own. I took my sad little self to the nearby Alamo Drafthouse, chowed down on some mozzarella sticks, and delighted in the sequel to one of the gayest films of all time, Top Gun.
Top Gun: Maverick is a perfect film. No notes. Tom Cruise? Weirdest fucking movie star in the world, but damn great in this movie. The action sequences? My normally uninterested ass was living for them. Jennifer Connelly? Never been better! And the gayness? Through the roof. Off the charts. Shooting for Mach 9 but feeling a little brazen and pushing it to Mach 10 instead.
I speak confidently on behalf of a sizable segment of the population when I say that, when one thinks of the 1986 film Top Gun, the first thing that comes to mind is not a person in a fighter jet. It is of glistening biceps being flexed during a game of shirtless beach volleyball.
The scene is legendary. To some, it’s aged into a pop-culture joke. To the more enlightened, it is hallowed. As one of my favorite writers, Dave Holmes, recently wrote in Esquire, “The Top Gun volleyball scene isn’t homoerotic. It is homosexual.”
“If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun spoke directly to you,” he went on. “And what it said was: ‘You’re gay now. Good luck.’” From personal experience, I can say that is a truth that extends to no matter when you first saw it.
But it wasn’t just the volleyball scene. (Though it was a lot the volleyball scene.)
It was Tom Cruise being so impossibly handsome. It was him having a perfect, yet attainable haircut. We love a good film haircut! It was fashion iconography—those aviators! It was sexual camp. Try and tell me whoever decided to set a love scene to “Take My Breath Away” while sheer linen curtains billow in the background was not a gay. And it was homoeroticism in overdrive between the pilots. As we all know, there is nothing gayer in this world than straight men. Every interaction between these characters lived up to that truth.
That’s a lot for Top Gun: Maverick to live up to, and it delivered.
It delivered a proud successor to the volleyball scene with the shirtless football game, played in the surf at twilight, canonically the gayest time of the day. It gave us shirtless 59-year-old Tom Cruise, looking better than ever, as part of that game—grace notes of Daddy on top of an already homoerotic scene. The score of the film is a constant tease of a Lady Gaga power ballad, which finally explodes at the end as the audience has just been moved to tears. The major plot involves generational trauma, and, let’s face it, there’s nothing gayer than that.
All of this is to say, if you want to be an ally this Pride Month, go see Top Gun: Maverick.
No, This Music Video Is the Gayest Thing This Week
Some say it’s awful the way that brands and corporations parachute into activism for the 30 days of Pride Month, put some rainbow flags on things, and Hoover up the queer dollars before ignoring the community for the next 11 months. After experiencing “Taste So Good (The Cann Song)” and its music video this week, I say to brands: Never stop.
The description alone on this video is already legendary. “For #PrideMonth, queer-owned brand Cann, in partnership with Weedmaps, brought together trailblazing LGBTQ+ artists, advocates and allies for an iconic music video celebrating queer love, inclusivity and cannabis.” That is certainly a collection of words!
But three of them are more important than the rest—“iconic music video”—a tease that this 100 percent lives up to.
I don’t know what in the name of Judy Garland is happening, but somehow the cannabis beverage company Cann managed an absolutely absurd assemblage of celebrities including Gus Kenworthy, Kornbread from RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sarah Michelle Gellar (?), and Patricia Arquette (?!?!?) to don latex bodysuits and perform choreography while singing along to a dance track that extols the virtues of this drink.
This is what Pride means to me.
Wrong, This Video Is the Gayest Thing This Week
That said, there is no greater skewering of the commoditization of Pride than comedian and Hacks star Meg Stalter’s “Hi Gay!” video.
In the original video from last year, she played a character who was a butter shop owner running a special deal “if you can prove that you’re queer.” Her shop also started selling candles. “Wouldn’t a candle be nice for gay stuff? In the bedroom, or just hanging out! We wouldn’t…” Her shop has been making butter since 1945, she says, “And we’ve been accepting all people since…the last four months. So yeah, we’re gagging for you to take a taste of Cecily’s Butter Shop.”
As a gift to us all, Stalter released a sequel to the video this week, once again opening, iconically, with “Hi gay!” “On a scale from normal sex to ass play, we’re more lesbian than ever,” Cecily asserts. “We think that gay people are OK. At least for the next 30 days.”
Relish in the pitch-perfect video here.
Just Kidding. The Gayest Thing This Week Is This.
Sara Ramírez was on the cover of Variety this week discussing her polarizing character Che Diaz from And Just Like That…
This is a magazine cover, friends. It is such a troll. Give it a Pulitzer. A Nobel. A special Tony Award.
I want it on a tote bag. I want it on a T-shirt. I want it framed over my bed, and also screen-printed onto my duvet cover. I want to carry wallet-sized versions of it around with me to hand out like parents do with their kids’ school photos. This is all I’m living for this week, and possibly forever.
Anyway, Happy Pride Month.
What to watch this week:
The Boys: They’re back in town! (Fri. on Amazon)
Floor Is Lava: We are in the Golden Age of prestige television. (Fri. on Netflix)
Ms. Marvel: A Marvel series that I am actually interested in. Miracles happen. (Wed. on Disney+)
P-Valley: I maintain that more people would watch if it retained its original name, Pussy Valley. (Fri. on Starz)
What to skip this week:
The Real Housewives of Dubai: Turns out it was a snooze!
Eiffel: About the forbidden passion that inspired the Eiffel Tower. Lol. (Fri. in theaters)
